Blinn College in Bryan experienced a decrease in enrollment this spring for the first time since 2007. The decrease was caused in part by revised Texas legislation, which requires all new higher education students to receive a bacterial meningitis shot before registering for classes.

Brandon Webb, marketing and media relations for Blinn College, said even though the number of students at the Bryan campus has decreased by 2.14 percent, the total number of students in the Blinn system has increased by 1.23 percent. On top of that, the number of contact hours — the hours a student spends in the classroom — has increased both at the Bryan campus and in the Blinn system overall by 7.13 percent. Because of this, it’s difficult to judge whether or not Blinn will lose funds.

“We report that number of contact hours to the legislature, and that’s what they reimburse us by,” Webb said. “Our reimbursement from the state will go up, but our tuition revenue will go down a little bit, so it’s a little hard to measure.”

Webb said he thinks the meningitis vaccine requirement is to blame, but that it is difficult to determine with complete certainty.

“It’s a tough question to speculate on,” Webb said. “We think it had an impact. If people drop off and never come back we don’t know if it’s because of the vaccine or a death in the family or something else.”

Webb said that since the new law only affects new students, some students who attend Texas A&M U. and wanted to take one or two classes at Blinn might have decided against it after learning they would have to get the vaccine.

“If you’re a new student, you’d have to show evidence of the vaccine,” Webb said. “If they were already enrolled before the legislation passed, they could stay here without getting the vaccine. It’s a complicated piece of legislation that had to be interpreted quite a bit.”

Webb said Blinn is in the process of figuring out how to increase enrollment in the future.

“We have completely renovated our recruiting process, not necessarily due to ups and downs semester to semester, but it was just time,” Webb said. “We’ve been doing the same recruiting for a number of years. We’ve had steady upward enrollment and we’re not in trouble, but that’s something you constantly want to fine tune to make sure we’re reaching students how they want to be reached.”

Mike Spies, assistant director for transfer admissions at A&M, said that the decrease in enrollment at the Blinn Bryan campus probably will not affect the number of students enrolled at A&M. The University has a partnership with Blinn College in which students are enrolled in classes part-time at both institutions while trying to gain full admittance into A&M.

“We can’t really say for sure one way or the other but I don’t think it’s going to be a major factor on our enrollment,” Spies said. “We get a lot of students from Blinn, but we get students from all over the state and country. We don’t have any shortage of applicants.”

Hallie Pierce, a senior psychology major who transferred from Blinn to A&M, said she can imagine the vaccine being a reason why enrollment at the Bryan campus has decreased.

“People don’t like being forced to get a vaccine,” Pierce said. “Required vaccines are pretty expensive.  A fee for parking is different than a fee for your health. It doesn’t affect different aspects of your life, whereas with your health, it’s your health.”